So much nonsense about Reverend Wright and Barack Obama. Isn't it obvious
to everyone that this is only a big deal because the Clintons want to play on
white voters' racial fears?

Obama has never said or done anything to suggest that he shares any of
Wright's offensive views. But I still hear people saying, "If he could associate
with the man for twenty years, he must have heard some of this, and it's bound
to have rubbed off."

So let's look at Wright's comments and see what they mean, and then at
Obama's reaction and see what that means, and then I'll give you the final,
absolutely true answer about how much difference it should make in deciding
how to vote.

And then, just for good measure, I'll take on a comparison between Hillary's
and Michelle Obama's senior theses, and, because my goal is to be profoundly
useful to the world, I will tell you what is significant in these papers and what
is not.

Reverend Wright

Reverend Wright made some outrageous comments, but keep some things in
mind:

1. He is of a generation of black Americans who have every right to be angry
and unforgiving. Just because white America would like to be forgiven does
not mean African-Americans are obliged to do so.

2. He was speaking in a black church to a black congregation, not acting as
spokesman for a presidential campaign.

Let's dispense with the "G-- d--- America" line first. He's a preacher. He can
use the word "damn" and it isn't swearing. He can invoke the curse of heaven
when he feels it's appropriate. I don't like that he said it or why he said it, but
when a preacher damns something, it's different from other people saying the
same words.

I was bothered by the "Jesus was a black man" line. Jesus most assuredly was
not a black man, he was of the people living in Palestine in the first generation
of Roman occupation. They're not black now and they weren't black then.

But then I remembered all the pictures of Jesus I grew up with -- the light
brown hair, gently waving down to his shoulders, the white white skin -- and I
realize that for centuries, white Christians have reimagined Jesus as a German
or Belgian. Why shouldn't blacks have the same privilege?

The point where I thought Rev. Wright went too far was the insane charge that
white people -- the U.S. government in particular -- created the HIV virus in
order to kill black people.

This is a blood slander, charging a deliberate campaign of genocide -- and not
only does Wright have no evidence, it is not even possible to synthesize any
virus at all, let alone one of such complexity, given present technology.

But with this vile charge, Wright reveals the game he's really playing. The
overall message of his preaching is this: Black people, nothing that is going
wrong in your lives is your fault, and there's nothing you can do about it except
get mad at white people.

No, he reassures them, Africans aren't dying of AIDS because of their own
irresponsible sexual behavior, it's a white conspiracy. Therefore black people
don't have to change in any way -- it's all someone else's fault.

A responsible message would be the Bill Cosby message: No matter whose fault
it is, nobody's going to fix things unless we fix them ourselves. So if we keep
engaging in self-destructive social patterns, that's our foolish choice.

Instead, Wright's anger is really just another way of flattering his congregation.
Making them feel complacent. For which Wright gets paid.

It's just like famous 19th-century New York minister Henry Ward Beecher
(whose sex scandal was the model for The Scarlet Letter). He's the one who
invented the phony idea that there was a gate in the wall of Jerusalem called
"the Needle's Eye," which was so low that camels had to kneel to get through it.

He did this because his congregation was very rich, and Jesus said that it was
as hard for a rich man to get into heaven as for a camel to pass through the eye
of a needle.

How could Beecher make his congregation feel like good Christians without
giving up their obscene fortunes? By explaining that all Jesus meant was that
rich people had to kneel (conveniently, at his church) and they'd get into
heaven with their money.

But there never was such a gate in Jerusalem. And a kneeling camel can't get
through any gate, since camels can't, or at least won't, move forward on their
knees. What Jesus plainly meant was it's impossible for rich people to get into
heaven, and Beecher couldn't deliver that message and keep his job.

Wright, like Beecher, finds it safer to tell his congregation lies than to tell them
to get on the stick and change their lives and their culture.

So my disdain for Wright's preaching is strong. However, I'm not in his church
so it's none of my business. There are plenty of other black preachers telling
their congregants the same lies and giving them the same excuses -- but there
are plenty of white preachers telling lies to their congregations, too.

That's just how it is in denominations where the people who don't like the
preaching can change churches or fire the preacher.

Obama and Wright

The real issue is: Should we be suspicious of Obama because of Wright's
teachings?

Obama has made it plain that he rejects Wright's racially divisive teachings.
But he is tied to Reverend Wright by bonds of friendship that transcend
doctrines.

They are friends. Reverent Wright and Obama worked together trying to make
life better for poor blacks in Chicago. Wright was part of Obama's spiritual
awakening and of his search for an identity as a black man. Obama hardly
knew his father. Wright took on some of that role in his life.

It's not as if Wright has been accused of a crime other than saying things that
make white people mad. I'm a white person. It makes me mad. So what?
Wright's not running for president; if he were, I wouldn't vote for him.

Here is my question to those who think Obama should have broken off his
friendship with Wright over Wright's offensive statements:

Do you want as President the kind of person who would deny and abandon his
closest friends in order to win that political office?

Think about your family. Has your father or your mother or a grandparent or a
sibling ever said something you thought was appalling and embarrassing? Do
any of them hold opinions that you disagree with?

If your answer to any of those questions was yes, did you respond by breaking
off all contact with them and denying your connection with them?

Sure, Obama called for Don Imus to be fired over his "nappy" remark -- he
didn't know Imus; Imus was not his friend. It's easy to call for the destruction
of a stranger.

But a friend who is as close as family? If you repudiate someone like that just
because he said something embarrassing, you aren't much of a friend, are you?

I think Obama's behavior has been impeccably correct and completely
honorable. Obama wants to be President of all the people of America, white
and black. But he's not going to suck up to angry white people by repudiating
one of his closest friends. Good for him.

Isn't it actually quite refreshing to have a candidate behave that honorably?

But if you insist on requiring that he completely separate himself from
someone who has said offensive things, then what about a candidate who
remains closely connected to someone who has committed crimes and done
things that offend just as many Americans?

I speak of Hillary, who persists in her connection to an admitted perjurer who
defiled the oval office with antics that would embarrass a randy college student
(at last after he got sober and/or grew up).

Yet people actually honor Hillary for standing by her husband -- and, by the
way, joining him in lying about his opponents and never apologizing for her
own false charges.

What's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose -- if you think Obama
should separate from Wright, then you should be calling for Hillary to divorce
Bill before she becomes President. After all, we wouldn't want to re-contaminate the White House with such indecency, would we?

And this time Bill would have way more free time. (Though less access to the
oval office.)

It's all nonsense. I hope a candidate does not have to abandon his friends to
become president. All he has to do is assure us that he does not share his
friend's offensive opinions -- which Obama has done -- and demonstrate that
he has never acted upon those ideas -- which Obama has also done.

That issue is closed as far as I'm concerned. If I hear anymore nonsense about
this from any of you, I will reach an ugly conclusion about your real motive.
No, I won't assume you're a racist, I'll assume something almost as icky: That
you're a Hillary supporter.

Michelle vs. Hillary: The Senior Thesis Smackdown

All during the time Hillary was First Lady (not President, despite her claim of
experience), Wellesley College kept her senior thesis under lock and key. They
invented a rule that anyone could access any senior thesis except one by a
sitting President or First Lady.

Princeton University was prepared to extend the same favor to Michelle Obama
when people asked for her senior thesis -- without even waiting for her to
become First Lady. But when reporters asked the Obama campaign about this,
they did what Hillary should have done sixteen years ago: They simply provided
the press with a copy of her thesis.

Since the press is not uniformly in support of Hillary, some reporters began
clamoring for Hillary's senior thesis, after all these years. And guess what?
She's no longer First Lady. So Wellesley allows you to see her thesis. You have
to go to their archives. You can't photocopy the whole thing. But you can read
it and copy bits of it.

So now I have read the conclusion of Michelle Obama's and of Hillary Clinton's
senior thesis, and I can tell you that the results are significant and important
for this election.

Not because of the content of their theses, however. These were seniors in
college! They have a right to learn a few things afterward, to change their
minds. Or do you think you should be judged your whole life by what you
thought and said in college?

Let me point out my own sorry example. The election of 1968. Nixon vs.
Humphrey -- but with George Wallace spoiling things by mounting the most
important third-party challenge in my lifetime (I was born in 1951).

Fall of 1968, I had just turned seventeen. Definitely not a senior. I was a white
kid raised in communities where I never saw black people, and while I had
been aware of George Wallace as a segregationist governor of Alabama, I was
ignorant of what that really meant in people's lives.

Segregation was over, I figured -- the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts had
determined that -- and now Wallace himself was declaring that he was no
longer in favor of segregation, implying that he'd just been doing what the
people of Alabama elected him to do. So in my youth and ignorance, all I saw
was a populist candidate running a third-party challenge.

I completely bought into the "not a dime's worth of difference" slogan and yes,
on my college campus I took part in the Wallace campaign, manning the
American Independent Party table by the student union building for a few
hours one afternoon and attending a couple of meetings.

But the non-student adults working with his campaign creeped me out. It
made me uneasy that people like that were Wallace's supporters. By the time
of the election I had drifted away.

Within a couple of years I had learned a little more and was deeply
embarrassed at my naivete and stupid enthusiasm. I changed my mind
completely. Now I have a deep aversion to bigotry-centered populist
demagogues -- one thinks, for instance, of the leaders of the anti-amnesty
movement. (I'm thinking of Pat Buchanan and, to my disgust, my fellow-Mormon Mitt Romney.)

But if you look at what I was doing in college, there's no denying it, I was a
Wallace supporter in September and October of 1968.

Does that youthful stupidity mean that I cannot ever get credit for growing up
and changing my mind? I hope not.

That's why, to me, the opinions Michelle and Hillary had as college seniors
aren't even interesting.

Michelle Not Racially Divisive

But let's lay one canard to rest right now. The only way you could read
Michelle Obama's paper and think she was being even the tiniest bit racially
divisive is if you want that to be the opinion people get about her. In short,
only Hillary supporters could find anything wrong with this paper.

Michelle's major was African-American Studies. Her paper was a study of the
degree to which black Princeton graduates identified with the black
community. That's not racial divisiveness, that's the scholarly field she was in!

She sent out questionnaires and got back enough responses to yield
interesting, if inconclusive, results. In the questionnaire she used questions
that revealed her ideas, at the beginning of the study, of what marked one's
degree of identification with black culture.

Using those markers, she reached the conclusion that during their years at
Princeton, black students tended to identify more closely than ever with the
black community, but a few years after leaving school and taking part in the
white-dominated mainstream culture, their degree of identification was much
less.

This is about how blacks in that time and in that place saw themselves vis-a-vis the real racial divisions in our country. But her study was not divisive, it
was observational.

Hillary's paper, on the other hand, was about radical community organizer
Saul D. Alinsky, whom she got a chance to meet and interview. Writing in the
late 1960s, Hillary was just feeling out her newfound radicalness and so she
was sympathetic to Alinsky's causes, though not worshipful of him.

The funny thing is that not being allowed to see this paper made anyone who
knew the topic wonder what she wrote that was so awful. When you actually
read it, you really don't see anything more than youthful hero-worship
combined with a terminal longing to be cool.

It's About How They Think

So the actual subject matter of both papers is really quite innocuous, in my
opinion.

But that doesn't mean they're irrelevant. On the contrary, they are both very
informative. I don't care what these two women believed in college. But the
methodology and the manner of writing tell us a great deal about how they
analyze and process information -- how they think.

What they think can change, but the way their brains work is almost certainly
locked in stone by that age. In short, we can tell from these papers how smart
they are, how open-minded, how incisive, how analytical.

I'm not talking about trivialities like spelling. They were educated at different
times and were supervised by different professors. Both wrote these papers
before spell-checkers and neither paper was written on a computer.

Hillary's spelling is better; Michelle Obama has faux pas like "occurances"
instead of "occurrences." But this is no surprise at all, given the deemphasis
on spelling in the years between their papers. Hillary is of my generation: We
were taught to spell. And maybe one had a better proofreader than the other.

I'm talking about ability to think, and Michelle Obama's paper reveals her to be
keenly analytical.

What I love is that in the process of her study, she realized the shortcomings of
her methodology and the inadequacy of her initial assumptions. She writes
quite clearly that the markers of commitment to the black community that she
started out with -- liking black music, eating black food, etc. -- might not have
been appropriate, and if she had it to do over again, she'd use different
standards.

Not only that, but she ended with suggestions for further studies that should
be conducted to get clearer, more useful results. She also speculated
intelligently on why she got the results she did, and on what it really means
about black students at Princeton.

On point after point, her analysis was incisive; yet she also introduced most of
the major doubts that her study could arouse. In short, she had a true
scientific attitude, with ego almost entirely removed from the process.

From this thesis, I see the youthful Michelle Obama as smart, honest, open-minded, humble, and determined to find out the truth regardless of
consequences.

Then I read Hillary's conclusion, and I was stunned. It's not just that her
opinions are all over the map, usually without any kind of evidentiary
justification. It's that she can't seem to write a paragraph that makes any kind
of point.

It's a chaotic mess. What does she think of Alinsky? One moment she seems
to think that his enterprise was valuable and important; the next, that he was
untrustworthy and unreliable and not a clear thinker. What does she think of
anything? She seems to be looking down on everybody.

And then it all comes clear. There's only one consistent theme that is
expressed throughout Hillary's paper. It's all about how smart she is, how
superior to everybody and every group she mentions. She can mock this and
that because she stands on a higher plane than they do.

Instead of being an earnest seeker after truth, like Michelle, Hillary writes as if
she knew "the truth" and if the reader is smart, the reader will know it too.

But in the pages that I read, Hillary shows no competence whatsoever at
rational analysis, at self-questioning; she writes pretentiously, but very, very
badly.

If you aren't very analytical yourself, you can come away from her paper
thinking what she wants you to think: Wow, wasn't Hillary Rodham, like, smart
and cool?

But if you hold her to any kind of rigorous standard of scholarship and
thought, her paper is an embarrassment. It's not that she's dumb, it's that
she's glib and assumes that whatever she happens to believe is the smart
thing.

If I got a paper like Michelle Obama's from a college student today, I'd be
impressed. She'd get an A -- after she corrected the spelling errors.

But I'd hand Hillary's back to her and say, "Now go do some research and
analysis and figure out what you think before you start writing your real thesis.
This one is a waste of everyone's time."

Michelle Obama is not running for President. But she is running for the office
-- First Lady -- that Hillary claims is the very best qualification for being
President eight years later.

I can tell you right now that if Barack listens to his wife the way that Bill
claims to have listened to Hillary, President Obama will have a far smarter
pillow-talk adviser than President Clinton ever had.

And that, my friends, does matter.

Bill Clinton married pretentious ambition. Barack Obama married the
smartest woman he knew.

 Many people have asked OSC where they can get the facts behind the rhetoric about the war. A good starting place is: "Who Is Lying About Iraq?" by Norman Podhoretz, who takes on the "Bush Lied, People Died" slogan.